Artist: George Condo

George Condo’s two-part exhibition - opening at Hauser & Wirth and Sprüth Magers in New York City - exclusively offers a glimpse into the artist’s creative process and limitless inventive drive in the medium of pastel on paper. Both galleries present new works in which Condo pushes the limits of improvisation - spontaneously employing gesso, fields of color and gestural pastel without any preparatory sketches - to delve deep into the challenges of expressing various states of the human psyche. Condo relies upon abstraction to reflect the fragmented, elusive nature of thought and feeling.

Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls;’ relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.

Condo would soon go on to spend a decade in Europe: in 1985 he moved to Paris and did not return to New York permanently until 1995, with the birth of his second child. During this period, Condo invented his hallmark ‘artificial realism’ and made his first foray into sculpture.